ABSTRACT
The terrain hierarchy discussed in this chapter was developed by a number of bodies, notably including the Australian CSIRO (Christian and Stewart, 1968), the UK Oxford–MEXE–Cambridge Group (Beckett and Webster, 1969), the South African National Institute of Road Research (Brink et al., 1968), and the University of Melbourne (Howard, 1970c). The units represent every scale from global to local, and thus parallel other scientific classifications such as those of soils by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) (1976) and of vegetation by Long (1974). The internal homogeneity and mutual distinguishabity of the units have been tested statistically at all the main categoric levels. The categories are given in Table 5.1, together with the most relevant mapping scales and remote sensing platforms for the recognition and representation of each level.
